MAPPING IN THE MOMENT

I am recovering from Covid, which is why I only just started blogging again. So forgive me if I'm still regaining some clarity. Slowly getting back into my usual writing habits. 

I want to talk about how I approach entries in my own books. In particular I want to talk about how I handle entries that are short and offer bare bones details. Some entries are more robust, with extensive maps and so forth, while some are more like a broad idea meant as a launching pad. When these come up in play I have two ways of handling them. The first is to plan ahead when I know something is likely to come up, and map out an area over the week between sessions. That is good when you have time, but if something comes up suddenly during play or if, like me this past week, you are too ill or pre-occupied to do the prep, you have to map and plan under the time crunch of live play. This blog post is about the latter. 

This past session my players went to Zikang Grotto in our Celestial Plume Masters campaign, for which I am using the Sons of Lady 87 book. The entry for Zikang Grotto in the book is quite short: 

The entry goes on to provide stats for the couple, gives two paragraphs on the Chamber of the Calamity Star (which includes a description of the Calamity Star Manual) and one short paragraph on exploring the Grotto further. 

I found myself at the start of the session, knowing the players were going to the Grotto but only having this paragraph to work with. I have run the grotto in the past but lost all my expanded notes. And I didn't want to replicate the prior version because I couldn't recall if the players in this campaign had been there or not, so I wanted it to feel fresh. 

I basically had to map out something fast that would engage the players, but do so while they were traveling to the Grotto. This meant I had maybe 10-30 minutes to put something down on paper, possibly less if they were very efficient, plus I had to do so while multi-tasking because I needed to facilitate play (which meant managing the players survival roll attempts for the journey and handling any special tasks or requests). 

Knowing all that I decided to go with a very simple approach. I figured I could just map out a few chambers, and focus on traps as the main threat. Traps would be easy because I could take traps from the WHOG rulebook and reskin them, maybe rework them a little. What I came up with was this: 

This was very manageable in the time I had available, but it ensured there would be some interesting challenges for the players to engage. I also added a slight puzzle element where the way to reach the Calamity Star Chamber would be to trigger one of the traps. The first trap was one of my favorites to rely on: Spear Trap. Here I decided to have it come up from the ground which I thought would be a bit more interesting and challenging. I also added a little twist to the body of Master Wang Fei by having the sword be special (it adds to a person's Command rank). I then decided to have a passage that collapsed, basing it on the Fragile Bridge Trap in WHOG. This would also be the trap that led to the Calamity Star Chamber. Further in I placed a trap of Hen-Shi statues that sent out jets of flame at anyone who approached. For the Calamity Star Manual Chamber, I just decided it would be in an alcove and coated in poison (so I wrote down quick stats for the effects).

My quick rationale for the traps was that Master Wang Fei had built them to protect the bodies of his two disciples (Master Wang is the skeleton in the upper left chamber and was responsible for their fate and riddled with guilt so this made some amount of sense to me). There is a whole tragic backstory that is part of the stat block entry for the couple: 

With more time, this obviously could be much more extensive and greater logic could be applied to its construction. However for the purpose of running a session this worked perfectly well. It gave the first half of our evening plenty for the players to engage. It probably took up about an hour or hour and half of our time. And the sword was a nice touch that worked well later in the game. 

When you are mapping under a live play time crunch, it can be tricky at first. A glance of my writing, which is never particularly good, shows it can be hard to get every letter onto the page so developing a short hand can be helpful. It is also not essential to get your best ideas out. Obviously you want good ideas, and you would like for them to be as close to the best you can do, but working under such tight time constraints you need to shift your focus from making it the best to just making it. Just get something on the page. 

And once you have an idea, just keep going with that idea. You will have plenty of opportunities for more well thought out dungeons and locations. In this kind of situation there isn't time to get overly precious about it. And sometimes that is a good thing because forcing yourself to make an instant choice, sometimes leads to places you wouldn't otherwise go. For instance I would rarely make an all trap location like this. But it turned out to be good because it gave it character and made it distinct from other places they had been. Plus it gave me an extreme focus, which made improvising the details before hand easier. 

I would say it is also useful to lean on the basics and what you know works. That is why I chose traps. I knew I could basically set up about a trap a room, give or take and that would keep things fun. And I kept it very simple. This is little more than three rooms.